Illegal Immigration in Small-town America

I see in the news that the little township of Riverside in Burlington County, New Jersey—where I lived briefly as a child in the early 60s—has voted to repeal a law that was voted in in July 2006.  The law would penalize employers or landlords $1,000 to $2,000 for hiring or renting to illegal aliens.  Riverside’s population of about 8,000 is estimated to be nearly half comprised of residents who are here illegally, many of whom come from Portugal and Brazil.

And why did this little township repeal this common-sense law?  Because they don’t believe they can afford to defend the legal challenges in federal courts!  What an outrage!  On the one hand the federal government demonstrates that it is absolutely willing to look the other way and not enforce its own immigration policy, and on the other they’re populating the courts with “justices” who will sometimes rule in favor of illegal immigrants—as happened earlier this year in Hazelton, Pennsylvania—thus stifling the efforts of small-town America in making and enforcing policy that is the federal government’s responsibility in the first place!

In the words of former Ohio congressman, Jim Traficant, “Beam me up!”

EBAY

I was just going to do an update on my EBAY stock post, because I see it has been doing rather nicely as of late.  But then I discovered I didn't post when I took my EBAY position, and I'd have sworn I had.  Oh well, you'll just have to take my word for it I suppose.  I purchased a long position in EBAY on April 19 at 34.80 per share.  Since then the position has been under water for most of that time.  There was a nice spike up in the first half of August that topped out above 37, after which it proceeded to sink back to the high 32s toward the end of that month.  Since then, however, it has been riding up nicely again and as I type, the price is 38.25, a gain of 9.91% from my entry price.

Redneck Humor

This one was just too good to pass up.  I happened to spot this photo on the Internet and couldn’t resist posting it here.  Recently having done some exterior work on my own humble abode I had to construct some homemade scaffolding also, but it certainly did not resemble this!

Obnoxious Bicyclist

Here’s another one of those bicyclists who has no problem at all with the fact that he’s violating the law and impeding the normal flow of traffic on a public road.  (See my blog post of May 28 for further info.)  It’s not easy to tell from this cell phone photo, but he’s riding right in the middle of the lane, and as you can see, I was the fourth in a line of vehicles being held up by this inconsiderate scofflaw.  This happened to be westbound on West Riverside Drive between Twelve O’clock Knob Rd. and Mill Ln. in Salem.  The speed limit there is 30 MPH, and we couldn’t have been travelling faster than 20 MPH.